Cenk Uygur

You don't want wild swings, communism, corporatism, right? You want to get to, hey, where's the right balance here between capitalism and and what people think is socialism.

Look, I run a company. And so I don't want companies to go away and, and I don't want you to hate all companies. I think Young Turks is a wonderful company, right? We provide great healthcare. We take care of our employees. We care about the community, et cetera. And we're building a whole nation online on, on those principles and the right way to run a company. Right. Um, but.

Guys, we're at the wrong part of the pendulum. The companies have overwhelming power and they're crushing us. We're like that scene in Star Wars where the trash compactor is closing in on them, the walls are closing in. We're almost out of time because they've captured the government almost entirely. They're only serving corporate interests. We've got to get back into balance before it's too late.

And that's why I care so much about structural issues. So I formed Justice Democrats, so that's AOC, et cetera, right? People know it as the squad. They know it as Justice Democrats, et cetera. I'm one of the co-founders of that. And my number one rule was no corporate PAC money, okay? So you're not allowed to take corporate PAC money.

By the way, now Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley have stopped taking corporate PAC money, and they've become, to some degree on economic issues, genuine populists. It's amazing. It happens overnight. All of a sudden, they're talking about holding corporations accountable, et cetera. Now, just Democrats wound up having other problems. They got too deep into social issues, not economic issues.

Oh, okay.

No, because, okay. So are you right? Not about companies, but about capitalism? Yes. Because you look at life expectancy 200 years ago, and you look at it now, and you go, wow, holy shit, we did amazing things. And what happened in the last 200 years? We went from dictatorships more towards democracy, wisdom of the crowd. We went from

you know, serfs and indentured servants and a nobility that holds the land to more towards capitalism. And boom, the crowd is right. Things go really well. The advances in medicine are amazing. And medicine is a great example. So, and on our show, I point all those things out and I say, look, we hate the drug companies because of how they capture the government, right?

But we don't hate the drug companies for creating great drugs. Those drugs save lives. They saved my life. They saved countless millions upon millions of lives. So the right idea isn't shut down drug companies. The right idea is don't let them buy the government, right? And I know we get back into our instinctual shells. So on the left, there'll be, oh, we should get rid of all billionaires. Why?

Why? Like, how does that fix the system? Tell me how it fixes the system, and I'm all ears, right? My solution is end private financing. Then you can be a billionaire all you like. You can't buy the government, right? That's a more logical way to go about it. I've never worn an eat the rich shirt, and it drives me crazy. I'm like, you would have eaten FDR, right?

And FDR is the best president, most populous president, in my opinion. And so, no, there's wonderful rich people. Of course, of course, there's a range of humanity, right? But you don't want to get rid of the rich. You don't want to get rid of companies, but you also don't want to let them control everything.

So, okay, I'll give you an example that's really, and that informs a lot of how I think about things, which is my dad. So my dad was a farmer in Southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border. No money. Um, in fact, his dad died when he was six months old and he, uh, and so they were saddled with debt and, uh, no electricity in his house, like as poor as poor gets.

And, uh, he wound up living the American dream. And so he, How did he do that? What made the difference? Well, what made the difference is opportunity, right? So I'm a populist because my dad was in the masses, right? And the elites say the masses are no good. We're smart, you're not. We're educated, you're not. Uh, we, we at meritocracy, we talk about that. We have earned merit.

And if you're a poor middle class, you have not earned merit. Okay. You're useless and worthless. And I hate that. So what did, uh, Turkey do back in the 1960s that liberated my dad? They provided free college education. You had to test into it. Okay. But the top 15%. Got a free college education at the best colleges in Turkey.

And my uncle saved all of our lives when he came to my dad and said, do you like working on this farm? And my dad's like, fuck no, right? It's super hot. It's super hard. They got to get up at four in the morning. If they're lucky, the family next door gives them a mule. If they're not, they got to carry the shit themselves. Okay.

He's, so my uncle told him work just as hard in school and you'll be able to get a house, a car, pretty girls, et cetera. So my dad works his ass off, gets into the school and he comes out a mechanical engineer and starts his own company. He creates a company in Turkey, hires hundreds of people. He then moves to America, creates a company here, hires tons of people, right? So do I hate companies?

No, my dad set up two companies and I saw how much it benefited people. I saw how much employees would come up to my dad 20, 30 years later in the street and hug him. And they tell me as a young kid, your dad's the most fair boss we ever had and we love him for it, right? That's how you run a company. And he taught me the value of hard work. But the reason I brought up here is because he taught me

Look, skill and ability is a genetic lottery. So you're not going to just get the rich... to win all the genetic lottery? No, there's gonna be tons of poor kids and middle class kids who are just as good if not better. You have to provide them the opportunity, the fair chance to succeed. You have to believe in them. So this isn't about disempowering anyone.

It's about empowering all of those kids who are doing the right thing or smart and wanna work hard so they can build their own companies and add to the economy. What in general is your view on meritocracy? So I love meritocracy. I wish that we lived in a meritocracy and I want to drive towards living in a meritocracy. So that's why I don't like equality of results.

So, okay, now people that are on the left will get super mad at that and go, what do you mean? Well, okay, brother, let's say you're at work and you got one guy complaining who's working his ass off, and the other guy that's going, I don't care, I'm not going to do it, right? Well, the guy who works super hard has to pick up the slack. Now he's working twice as hard, right?